Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the greatest thing I know, no more pay per minutes of use, call everyone, every time, everywhere!

However Open Source VoIP software have major drawbacks, some have a weird Graphical User Interface (GUI), some try to do everything from scratch, some are unstable… That really piss me off!

As a KDE user, I have no integrated software that is able to use my VoIP provider, stanaphone. KPhone is horrible, KCall tries to be better, but since it uses KPhone stack, it doesn’t work right, so I have to use LinPhone, a project that have a really weird GTK2/Gnome GUI. And I lost everything KDE provides me.

For those unaware of KDE features, you can have remote resources for Address Book and like, they can be everything, you can store your address book on a IMAP folder or using SSH, so my home, work and other computers all share the same address book, agenda and notes! Wonderful. Also, my instant messenger (kopete) uses the Address Book resource, everything integrated, wonderful!

KCall uses this feature and instead of creating an address book from scratch, you can edit contacts using KAddressBook and they’ll show up, a great plus. But it’s poor implementation bugs me while using remote resources. Also, it use KPhone SIP stack, which sucks. Another thing is that it doesn’t cooperate with Arts, the KDE sound server.

A week or so I read about Tapioca-VoIP, developed by a Nokia sponsored research team, it uses Nokia’s Open Source SIP stack called Sofia-SIP and GStreamer to handle encoding/decoding sound and output it to sound card or sound server. Altough not ready yet, it seems much more promising, since it have a narrow focus, skilled people and funding.

So I think: “KDE infrastructure + Tapioca-VoIP = 99% of a KDE integrated VoIP”, yes it is! And I think I can code the other 1%, so I have started.

So far I have opted to use the QT/KDE dock utility, as used in KDevelop, Gwenview, KOffice and others. With it you can have a widget that can be re-arranged as user wants, hidden or detached. I don’t like the tab-arrangement commercial phones are using, but it can be an alternative layout.

I have also created a small, but important, widget: AddresseeSelector. It’s like KABC::AddresseeDialog, but it’s more powerfull and customized, I hope it get included in KDE. I’ll request it as soon as I have something more stable and optimized. This widget have a search bar to filter the list view that features contact’s information. I have tried to put there most relevant information, like Picture, Name, Phones and Addresses. The latter are split into some columns: Phones (every phone), Mobile Phones, Work Phones, Home Phones, Work Faxes, Home Faxes, Addresses (every address), Home Addresses and Work Addresses. Users will be able to hide some columns and this will use KConfig to save this preference for your application.

So far you can grab AddresseeSelector at http://tux08.ltc.ic.unicamp.br/~gustavo/addresseeselector/.
KDE Bug Report: #115706.

Ideas?

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